(Archived) Stop breaking things.

[Coach Wade 80]

I haven't been to the forum in quite a while. I sort of got tired of asking for a common-sense layout to the android tablet version of Evernote and being ignored. Not to mention the space-stripping bug that was first reported LAST OCTOBER that still exists whenever you use an android mobile client to edit a note created on the PC client. Itmakes random sentences inyourwriting look like this and it savesthese errors, causing a proofreading nightmare. You have added dozens of new features without fixing THE PRIMARY REASON MOST PEOPLE RUN A FRIGGIN' NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE IN THE FIRST PLACE!

I said five months ago that the moment that bug was fixed I would buy a permanent subscription account. No bug fix = no cash.

I just HAD to come back and ask whether or not any of the developers actually INSTALLED and RAN the latest version of the android widget on ANY tablets before they released it?

There's a simple statement: if it isn't broken, don't fix it. I searched the forums pretty thoroughly and I don't see even ONE person asking for a new widget for android. We were happy with the old one. It did what we wanted it to do. There have been THREE messages posted in the forums asking for features to be ADDED to the widget. That was enough to make you drop everything and rewrite it from scratch while ignoring existing bugs, huh?

Now my latest update to Evernote on my transformer tablet says it doesn't work with the widget I've been happily using for almost a year. Fine, I'll install a new one and change my workflow at the whim of a developer. Except that it won't download and won't install. Then I look at the comments and reviews and find seven one-star reviews from the last day or so complaining about the new widget on tablets.

And then I come back to the forum and find that instead of clearly delineated forum links, now we're using a tag cloud. There are these things called NEURONS, they are in your SKULL and you need to use them occasionally. You are making random changes for the sake of random change. Does any other forum on the web function like this? No? Why is that, do you think? Heck, I've been moderating message boards since FidoNet in 1991 and I've never seen a forum setup like this. Nor am I interested in taking the time to learn to use it. Evernote has made me relearn things I have already learned to do perfectly fine WAYYYYYY too many times.

Was there some major reason you felt it was necessary to leave behind the perfectly good topic tree organizational structure that everyone who has ever used the web for more than eight minutes is familiar with? Actually, you know what? I don't care. This is a stupid, nonintuitive, grabasstic and disorganized forum layout and as a result of it I know at least one user that will not be bothering to use it in the future.

If it is BROKEN, you may FIX it. If it is NOT, leave it ALONE!

I'll put it bluntly. I've written 83,000 words of a novel in Evernote. I use it on a pretty much hourly basis. And I'm about to delete the dang thing completely off of every platform I use-- my PC, my phone, and my tablet. Obviously, I not only can't trust the developers to leave my workflow alone so I can be efficient, but I also can't trust them to FIX what is actually broken.

By the way, I've never rolled back to a previous version of an android app before, so THANK you Evernote, for the time it's going to take me to research how to do that, just so I can get my widget back. That's my precious writing time you are stealing from me, so if you can't understand why I'm pi$$ed then go back to the top and read this again.

~D.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Welcome back to the forums.

I think you will find the developers to be quite receptive to suggestions for improvement, but the more data you can give them, the better they can do their job. Did you ever contact the developers regarding your formatting issues from before?

I think I have already responded (in the same thread linked above) to some of your formatting concerns. As I mentioned there, I share some of your frustration, and so tend to go from Evernote (initial thoughts) to plain text (synced with Scrivener through Dropbox) to Word or Pages before publication. As much as I like Evernote and WANT to do everything in it, I am afraid I cannot, because I need more control over the formatting (basically, I just need plain text). I don't think it makes the app useless, by any means, but it does mean you'll want to use the app that best fits the project you are doing. I am sure even Evernote staff use word processors and the like on occasion.

As for the forums, I think you'll find lots of information posted on why it needed to be changed (). It was breaking, and so Evernote staff stepped in to fix it. It is a little unconventional, perhaps, but it works pretty well (in my opinion). If you have any specific recommendations for improvement, I am sure they'd like to hear.

Anyhow, I hope the developers can help address some of the issues you are seeing on Android. Personally, I haven't come across them myself (Nexus 7, Samsung GIII, and Droid X), but my use case is a little different, and I tend to use iOS more.

[alessio 5]

Oh, guys, I sooo feel your pain. I am too frustrated with all the "new" features (which we don't necessarily need)

and braking things that we really started to rely on.

I became premium user mainly to be able to do offline sync (I am without a data plan and many times without WiFi connection).

Unfortunatelly, offline sync stopped working for me in recent versions... I wonder how many "new" features will we get before

they fix this issue.

(I wrote to EN support and they quickly replied. Thank you for that. They confirmed it is EN bug and they filled an internal ticket

for their QA team. Hopefully, EN team will start working on it soon...)

[spip72 10]

Agree, agree and agree. In fact I agree to the degree that I already have exported all of my notes out of Evernote and to a competing product. I am premium user, but will not extend my subscription beyond this period. Why? Because basic editing functionality doesn't work good enough. It's error prone and I don't trust it. I don't care about new features, as long as the basic core functionality is not working...

[jefito 5,589]

Re the forum change: Hmm, let's see now. The Evernote product categorizes notes mainly by tagging rather than by strict hierarchy, maybe that would work as well for the forums. I guess if your neurons can handle tagging in general, they ought to be able to handle the forums, then. Hardly random; in fact, consistent. Granted, the forum rollout wasn't as smooth as it could have been, and search is still not all there (when was it ever?), but the motivation is understandable, and, being the true tagging automaton that I am, I kinda prefer it.

For the rest, right -- if Evernote doesn't meet your needs, then you shouldn't be paying for it. It's pretty simple, and I think that everyone understands that. And anyone who chooses to vent here rather than spend their precious writing time (no matter how valid their concerns may be, and I'm not unsympathetic) elsewhere ought to remember that writing here is exactly that -- their own choice -- and that all posts here don't need to be jeremiads; simple, brief statements are still allowed and probably take less time to produce.

[gmc 8]

I agree with the above frustrations - EN should firstly be a proper note taking application (or maybe they should rename the program!), and I also find the forum layout/function confusing, but I can can be re-taught how to use it I guess. Interesting that none of the 20 other forums I'm on require so much head scratching. It's especially messy from Mobile Chrome.

Some basic note take features that I've seen asked for but never get addressed: (we're talking mobile here)

. proper outlining - you know like any text editor can do from the 80's. In/out dent, user configurable sequence, Use TAB.

. Undo - multiple please

. begin tag search on 1st char as on desk app, thereby allowing automatic filtering of tag (if constructed properly). Why not implement it on mobile if it makes sense to do on the desk?

. simple image rotating. Crop is there, where's rotation? I spend much time trying to figure out how to take a picture and get the default rotation that I want in EN.

. editing ones note from current position

. would be nice - date/time stamp button

As I mentioned before, I don't really give a ***** what it looks like, it's a tool for me and I want functionality. Well, proper memory usage would be nice too...

[jefito 5,589]

Just as a starting point, here's how I use the forum:

• I start with Evernote General Discussion, and click on any sub-forum that's highlighted (meaning there are posts there that are unread by me); it's usually Forum Feedback and Evernote Knowledge Base that have posts, and often they are misplaced, so I'll try to do any there's a round of tagging or moving for posts that need it. Once those sub-forums are read (they're pretty low traffic), I move back up to the main Evernote General Discussion area and read the rest, then click Mark Forum Read, just to wipe the slate.
  
• Then it's on to Announcements and EN the Lounge, again, fairly low-traffic areas.
  
• Then I move to the main Evernote forum. As this is organized by client tags, I look first at the tags that interest me personally: Android, Windows and Web, in that order (meaning that I click on each of these client tags to filter the total forum posts). Reading posts in these tag-driven :"sub-forums" winnows down the main Evernote forum, which is where I head next. At that point, I am looking for posts that are not categorized by a client tag, so I'll do that, and visit any posts that relate to my clients (again, Android, Windows and Web) that for some reason (which I haven't figured out yet) don't appear when I click on the tag name under the main Evernote forum (I might hit them with the appropriate tag at that point). By then, most of the remaining posts are tagged for iOS, Mac or Other, and I don't care about those as much, in general. If I have time/interest in a particular topic, I'll read it, but otherwise, I just click Mark Forum Read for this forum.
  

That's pretty much it for me. I don't use Hello or Food. I might check into the Clearly or Skitch forums occasionally, but I don't use them too often, so low interest. I do use the Web Clipper, so I visit that occasionally, but it tends to work well for me these days. All of these have tag-driven organization, so it's easy to drill down to what I am looking for. I tend not to use Search all that often, as it's not working so well, as noted, but I know that the EverGnomes know about the problems and are working hard behind the scenes to make it better, so I have hopes for the future there.

It doesn't seem all that difficult to me, but I'm probably not a typical forum user -- I'm curious about what's hanging other folks up. Is it just that it's different from the commonly found strict hierarchy based forums?